1. Field of the Invention
This invention pertains to the field of metal working machinery. More particularly, it pertains to equipment for holding a workpiece in a particular position while another machine performs operations on the workpiece such as boring, shaving, grinding, drilling and the like. This particular invention is used to hold a plurality of similar parts in rigid and accurate position while the machine performs the same operation on each part.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Industry requires many mechanical operations be performed on a single part before its assembly can be completed. Numerous parts are often required to build products and each part must be molded, cut, drilled, and ground to finished tolerances before it can be made a part of the finished product. The machines that perform these operations are usually large and stationary. The parts must be brought to the machine and placed on a work surface before the machine can begin its operation.
While one or two parts may be easily and efficiently mounted in a vise or other part holder, where a large number of similar parts are to be machined, mounting one or two at a time becomes wasteful of time and manpower, and also prevents the machine from performing the operation in an efficient manner. Various designs of vises have been tried in order to mount a plurality of similar parts on the work surface of the machine so that the machine can perform the same operation on the parts in a rather large batch thus reducing the time to mount each part.
In almost every case, vises of the prior art have been made using a single pair of clamping jaws to hold one part at a time. To hold a plurality of parts, the mounting base is just made bigger and heavier and the pair of clamping jaws are duplicated so that while there are more pairs of clamping jaws on the mounting base, each pair continues to hold only one part. While this type of vise allows for mounting more than one part at a time, each part must be separately adjusted in its own vise which results in longer time periods to set up the mounting plate as well as continuing the inefficiency of the past.